My latest: on incarnation, Theotokos, and abortion, in Commonweal

I have an essay in the newest issue of Commonweal called “Mother of the Unborn God.” It’s something of a sequel or peer to previous essays in The Christian Century on similar themes: “Birth on a Cross” and “Jewish Jesus, Black Christ.” This one takes conciliar confession of Mary as Theotokos as the metaphysical starting point for theological and moral reflection on Christian teaching about abortion—a topic, if memory serves, that I’ve never written about before. I hope I do justice to it, or at least to the confluence of theological questions raised by faith in Him who was conceived by the Holy Spirit / and born of the Virgin Mary.

Click here to read the full essay.

My latest: a review of Matthew Thiessen on the Jewish Paul

I’m in the latest issue of Commonweal with a review of Matthew Thiessen’s book A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles. Here’s how it opens:

Of all conversion stories, St. Paul’s is surely the most famous. As a zealous Pharisee, Saul was a tortured soul persecuting his fellow Jews for their dangerous faith in a failed Messiah. Starting in Jerusalem, this band of messianic Jews proclaimed a message that was catching like a plague. And just as with plagues inflicted on Israel in the past, God’s people needed a righteous man to rise up and put an end to it. Once disciplined, these wayward Jews would come to see the light. They would give up their nonsense about a crucified King; they would return to strict observance of God’s Law; and God’s punishment of his people would come to an end.

But on the road to Damascus, God stopped Saul in his tracks. He blinded him with heavenly light. He indicted him for his murderous ways. And he appointed him an apostle to the gentiles. Within days Saul was baptized and preaching the good news that God raised Jesus from the dead. Naturally, he gave up the Law of Moses, since Jesus had fulfilled the Torah and thereby rendered its observance optional, negligible, even obsolete. What mattered now was faith, a posture of receptivity and trust in God’s promises available not only to Saul’s fellow Jews but to non-Jews as well. Saul took this message across the Roman Empire, effectively founding the Church as we know it: predominantly gentile, faith-centered, and Law-free.

This is how Saul became Paul—how the persecuting Pharisee gave up Judaism for Christianity. Except that it isn’t, at least not in key respects.

Click here to read on.

My latest: a review of Tara Isabella Burton

I’m in the latest issue of Commonweal with a longish review of Tara Isabella Burton’s latest (nonfiction) book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Online, the title is “Have We Become Gods?” In the magazine, it’s “The Brand Called You.” Here are the opening two paragraphs:

I am what I want, and I have the power within myself to make myself what I want to be, if only I find the will to activate this inner potential—or rather, to manifest this authentic identity. Such is the thesis under review in Tara Isabella Burton’s new book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. The thesis is not a new one. It has a long history, which, in Burton’s telling, begins around the fifteenth century. Though she finds its philosophical culmination in the eighteenth, with the Enlightenment, most of her story covers the past two hundred years: from bon ton and Beau Brummell to “the two most prominent self-creators of the past twenty years,” Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. Across Western Europe and the Anglophone world, self-creation as both a transcendent possibility and a moral imperative trickles down to ordinary people’s lives and self-understanding, mutating in tandem with religious, economic, and technological changes. Since creation is traditionally the prerogative of deity, Burton’s story is ultimately about “how we became gods.”

Burton is a reliable chronicler. This book continues a theme explored in her 2020 work, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. There she argued that rumors of religion’s death in the West have been greatly exaggerated. The God of Abraham may be on life support, so to speak, but other gods are alive and well. We haven’t refuted religion so much as “remixed” it. Postmodern spirituality is a potent cocktail of magic, money, and memes; a hybrid made possible by the internet, the dynamic power of capitalism, and the loss of authority once vested in religious institutions and their ordained leaders. America, at least, is not a land of atheists or even agnostics. It’s full of witches, cosplayers, crystals, fangirls, Proud Boys, and Goop. Is SoulCycle a religion? What about wellness culture? The borders of religion turn out to be porous. Accordingly, Burton suggests we’re misreading the signs of the times. We don’t live in a secular age. The gods haven’t vanished; they’ve migrated. Our age is as religious as any other. You just have to know where to look.

Read the rest here. And take note, please, that the URL for the review concludes in this way: “burton-trump-kardashian-east.” Go back a decade and find me somewhere in New Haven, nose buried in a book, prepping for comprehensive exams on systematic theology, and tell me that one day I’d write an essay with those names in the URL. My assumption would have been that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong in my career…

New essay published in Commonweal: “The Specter of Marcionism"

I've got a new essay published in the latest issue of Commonweal titled "The Specter of Marcionism." It uses the combined examples from last year of Andy Stanley's controversial teaching on the Old Testament and the First Things review relitigating the Mortara case to think about the different ways in which Protestants and Catholics struggle with the election of the Jews, Israel's scriptures, and supersessionism. Here's a taste:

"On this, all can agree. God and the Jews are a package deal. As 1 John 2:23 says of God and Christ—that one cannot have the Father without the Son, or the Son without the Father—so here: you cannot have Abraham’s God without Abraham’s children. Reject the latter and you lose the former. In its rejection of Marcionism, the church staked a claim to this principle: the only God with whom it would have to do was the Jewish God, the God of Moses, Hannah, Mary, and Jesus. But the church’s consistency in maintaining this principle was uneven at best. The specter of Marcion continued to haunt Europe. It even casts its long shadow over the Shoah. It is no accident that history’s greatest crime against the Jews came in the heart of Christendom. No longer did Israel’s menace wear the face of a Pharaoh or a Haman. Now it was the brothers of Jesus according to the Spirit who terrorized, or turned away, the brothers of Jesus according to the flesh."

Read the whole thing here.